MEMBERSHIP (p. 5) "… Again last year the Computer Society led all IEEE groups and societies: we had a total of more than 45,000 members as of late January. Foreign and student membership is growing especially fast, giving the society additional diversity and vitality."

INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS (p. 7) "With one exception, the articles in this issue deal with visual machine perception. The emphasis is on inspection rather than on using vision to assist in assembly. The inspection environment is usually easier to control and the accept/reject decisions required are often easier to determine than the location and identification information needed for automated assembly."

COMPUTER VISION (p. 11) "What is behind the present upsurge in the use of computer vision? What are the differences among systems and what do they have in common? Can any 'universal' principles of computer vision be established? Where is the field likely to move in the future? …"

INSPECTION (p. 32) "Automation of manufacturing visual processes is a recent and rapidly growing technology involving contributions from pattern recognition, image processing, and artificial intelligence, as well as a host of specialized techniques for moving and manipulating the objects being inspected. Generally speaking, systems of this kind in use or in advanced stages of development represent hard or fixed automation, while general-purpose image analysis systems are yet to come."

INSPECTION DESIGN (p. 40) "The increasing interest in automatic inspection stems from the availability of low-cost processors and memory and solid-state imaging devices. … Techniques which have already succeeded in production inspection systems are emphasized in this survey of the basic approaches to inspection system design."

JAPANESE COMPUTING (p. 50) "This report describes Japanese R&D in computer vision systems for industrial applications, and the desirable properties of, and typical hardware for, such systems. It also surveys systems now in operation in Japan and the specific techniques they employ."

SPEECH RECOGNITION (p. 65) "Presently available systems, however, have only a few of the characteristics of a human listener. While they respond to verbal commands and—depending on the recognition vocabulary and user's skill—approach the speed of natural language in certain limited circumstances, they are also unfortunately error-prone. Therefore, their use may require greater care than more conventional data entry devices. …"

MULTIPROCESSORS (p. 75) "… This survey describes the architectures, system organiza-tions, error re-covery facilities, operating systems, and other features of multiprocessing systems made by five major US main-frame manufacturers. … The concluding section discusses general issues in multiprocessing, drawing upon the information presented in the survey."

AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (p. 101) "These [179] articles and papers describe the philosophy and design of multiprocessors and their operating systems. Almost all deal with experimental systems built as research projects in universities or in industry."

DESIGN BY OBJECTIVES (p. 118) "… DbO is a set of system specification methods which any reader can freely use. Much of it is simply adapted from systems engineering concepts, except that I am applying those concepts to programs ('logicware') and data ('dataware')."

DATA TRAPPING (p. 126) "The Hawk 4010 Datatrap, introduced by International Data Sciences, is a portable diagnostic data communications test set designed to monitor and interactively communicate with data appearing at the EIA RS-232 interface."

"The microprocessor-based unit locates and isolates problems in the hardware and software by simultaneously displaying both transmit and receive data. …"

ROBOTIC DRILL (p. 130) "Can a robot work on an aircraft production line? The answer, quite simply, is 'yes.' One robot is drilling and routing sheet metal parts on the production line of the F-16 fighter aircraft at Air Force Plant Number Four in Fort Worth, Texas, resulting in increased productivity and a reduction in manufacturing costs."

OPTICAL DISKS (p. 139) "Digital optical disk products providing 1010 bits capacity will appear on the market in the next year or two, according to the February issue of Computer and Data Processor Technology. Their major impact will be in tertiary storage applications, such as archival files and possibly disk back-up. While the impact on tape-based mass storage systems will be great, the impact on magnetic disks and conventional one-half inch magnetic tape drives will be minimal."

May 1996

ONLINE MARKETING (p. 16) "The Center for Media Education (CME) and other education, consumer, and health advocacy groups have issued a report urging the Federal Trade Commission to protect children from what they call exploitive and unfair on-line advertising and marketing strategies."

US DIGITAL LIBRARY INITIATIVE (p. 22) "Digital library research projects thus have a common theme of bringing search to the Net. This is why the US government made digital libraries the flagship research effort for the National Information Infrastructure (NII), which seeks to bring the highways of knowledge to every American. As a result, the four-year, multiagency DLI was funded with roughly $1 million per year for each project."

LIBRARY FEDERATION (p. 28) "A University of Illinois project is developing an infrastructure for indexing scientific literature so that multiple Internet sources can be searched as a single federated digital library."

GEOGRAPHIC RETRIEVAL (p. 54) "The Alexandria Project's goal is to build a distributed digital library for materials that are referenced in geographic terms, such as by the names of communities or the types of geological features found in the material. The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) will comprise a set of Internet nodes implementing combinations of the four primary ADL architecture components …"

INTEROPERABILITY (p. 61) "The Stanford Digital Library project has undertaken work to address the problem of interoperability, which is particularly important because standardization efforts are lagging behind the development of digital library services. We used CORBA, the distributed-object standard developed by the Object Management Group, to implement information-access and payment protocols. …"

INQUIRY-BASED EDUCATION (p. 69) "We are deploying the UMDL [University of Michigan Digital Library] in three arenas: secondary-school science classrooms, the University of Michigan library, and space-science laboratories. … Addressing the needs of high school students within a general-purpose digital library particularly stresses the flexibility of our underlying architecture. The UMDL must support services quite distinct from those that other digital libraries and the World Wide Web offer."

THE NEXT 16 YEARS (p. 78) "Expanding network capacity is matching—and even exceeding—microprocessor advances, but software is not keeping up. Is a return to programming-as-art a solution or a heresy?"

EMPLOYMENT 2005 (p. 87) "As some of the world's largest corporations downsize, the smallest are growing wildly. It's a whole new game for computer professionals. What's valued in this topsy-turvy market? Portable skills that are constantly kept current."

SOFTWARE COSTING (p. 103) "The ability to measure all activities associated with software production has led to the concept of activity-based studies of software cost. This approach is very promising but still in development."

OBJECT TECHNOLOGY (p. 105) "… In general, inheritance is applicable only if you can seriously argue for the presence of an 'is' relation between the instances of the parent and heir classes. This guideline is broad enough to include some of the more controversial uses, but limiting enough to exclude obvious mistakes."

WEBBED STUDENTS (p. 112) "… Technological en-hancements are changing educational approaches by opening new channels for information distribution and instruction. North Dakota State University is taking advantage of such enhancements by bringing the World Wide Web into the classroom."